Anxiety at work + how to bring it up professionally
Owning It: The Anxiety Podcast
Caroline Foran
4.4 • 654 Ratings
🗓️ 16 March 2026
⏱️ 49 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this particularly helpful episode, I’m joined by Louise Thompson, a career coach who specialises in helping people navigate confidence, leadership and anxiety in the workplace. It's one of the most practical episodes I've done. It's not about when work is causing anxiety, but what to do when you still have to go to work but your anxiety or mental health is getting in the way. Together, we talk about why work is such a pressure point for anxiety, and how to bring more of your human self to work without feeling like you’re compromising your professionalism. We get into the very real fear of being vulnerable at work, how to judge who feels safe to talk to, and how to frame conversations around anxiety, capacity and flexibility in a way that actually supports you. Louise shares practical scripts, questions to ask yourself, and guidance on managing up, down and across — making this a genuinely useful episode for anyone struggling to navigate anxiety at work.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for listening to Owning It. If you would like to support the series, the best thing you can do is just tell a friend or better yet share it on social media. |
| 0:08.0 | If you really, really want to support, you can subscribe to me on Substack where I write a weekly column. |
| 0:13.0 | Listeners of the pod get a 20% discount forever at carolineforin.substack.com. |
| 0:18.7 | Thank you. |
| 0:20.0 | Hello, dear listener and welcome back to owning it the anxiety podcast with me, Caroline Foran.substack.com. Thank you. Hello, dear listener and welcome back to owning it the |
| 0:22.5 | anxiety podcast with me, Caroline Forin, author of everything I wish I'd known about anxiety, which I will |
| 0:29.1 | pop a link for in the show notes. This episode is one I'm so excited to share. It's super practical, |
| 0:36.5 | incredibly helpful for anyone navigating anxiety in the workplace. |
| 0:40.7 | So not necessarily anxiety about work, but trying to figure out how to negotiate or navigate or |
| 0:47.5 | broach the subject of what you're going through in work without feeling like you're negating |
| 0:52.8 | your professionalism, without making yourself feel |
| 0:55.9 | emotionally unsafe, and doing so in a way that benefits both you and the workplace. |
| 1:01.8 | For this episode, I'm joined by career coach Louise Thompson, and she's so brilliant. |
| 1:07.3 | Her advice is, we just really get into it, we offer scripts and we use myself as a guinea pig |
| 1:13.8 | and we go through all the different types of relationships and dynamics that are in the workplace |
| 1:17.2 | and how to know how to go about i guess bringing your more vulnerable self into work in a way |
| 1:23.2 | that works for you enjoy the episode and as always if you want to support the series and keep it going, |
| 1:28.7 | an order of my book would mean the world to me. Be back soon. Louise Thompson, I'm so |
| 1:36.2 | happy to have you here on Owning at the Anxiety podcast this morning. Thank you for joining me. |
| 1:41.3 | Thank you so much, Caroline. I'm really pleased to be here because it's a topic |
| 1:45.7 | that I have suffered with in the past and I really, really see it in a lot of my clients. So |
| 1:52.3 | I think it's a good conversation we're going to have today. Anxiety in the workplace is something, |
... |
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